1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communication apparatus, and more particularly to communications apparatus for supplying and acquiring products and services from one or more suppliers of communications services or services offered over communications channels.
The invention is chiefly, but not exclusively, concerned with the supply of telecommunication services to a customer from one or more telecommunications suppliers.
2. Related Art
More particularly, the present invention is primarily concerned with the communication or billing or charging information. At present, different suppliers of telecommunications services charge on different bases. Suppliers of data network services (e.g. local area networks) often charge on a fixed rate basis, without taking any account of the amount of usage at the network. This makes accounting extremely simple. On the other hand, telecommunication companies have historically charged for network usage, and have evolved fairly complicated charging strategies which differentiate between local and national calls, calls at different times of day, and so on.
In many existing networks, communications bandwidth is a scarce resource, and hence such pricing strategies tend to reflect this by pricing at a higher rate services for which there is greater demand, so as to attempt to optimise the usage of the network. It is to be expected that there will continue to be a desire to make more efficient use of communications bandwidth in future. Our earlier international application number PCT/GB94/01128 (A24601), filed on May 24, 1994, published as WO94/28683, describes a telecommunications system in which customer terminal apparatus is arranged to negotiate xe2x80x9con the spotxe2x80x9d prices with different telecommunications suppliers. In the system described in that application (which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety) there may be no xe2x80x9cstandardxe2x80x9d tariffs; instead, each call (or other network service) may be priced individually.
Our earlier filed British patent application No. 94303092.4, filed on Apr. 28, 1994 (Agents reference A24847), and published as WO95/30317, discloses negotiation in an integrated telecommunications network, and is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference. Also disclosed therein is a visual user interface for service selection.
At present, the problem of charging communications users is a formidable technical challenge. Long gone are the days when it would have been possible to consider manual administration of accounts. Some of the issues involved are discussed in the British Telecommunications Engineering Journal, Volume 11, Part 4, January 1993 xe2x80x9cSpecial issue on billingxe2x80x9d. In that issue, some figures for the billing system operated by British Telecommunications plc are given as follows:
The system supports 23 million customers and produces 100 million bills a year. The bills itemise 15 million calls a day, and charge a revenue of £24 million per day. The billing system runs on 29 mainframe computers, and requires 1400 gigabytes of data on magnetic disks; 5 million lines of COBOL statements; 14 million screen exchanges every day; and 60 thousand connected terminals. At page 296 of that issue, it is disclosed that it is anticipated that 1.5 gigabytes of data need to be transferred through the network every night solely for the purpose of billing.
It will be apparent that the cost of billing is substantial. It has been estimated at over 10% of the revenue of many telecommunication companies, and much more than this in some cases. It seems likely that the cost and required complexity of billing systems will continue to increase in future, with the provision of ever wider ranges of telecommunications products and services and the proliferation of special rates and tariffs.
It is, of course, known (e.g. from GB 2001788) for user apparatus to log transactions, but since reconciliation is performed manually this merely increases the work to be performed by the user.
In EP-A-474 555 there is described multi-media communications apparatus, for example an ISDN terminal, which is configured to provide so-called xe2x80x9ccommunications management reportsxe2x80x9d so that communications charges and communication history can be used for communications management. The reports are, in effect, enhanced xe2x80x98journalsxe2x80x99 of the type produced by most fax machines: they may include the identity (number) of the party with whom communication was achieved, the type of service (video telephony, telephony, etc), the duration, time and date, and cost of the call can all be provided.
In EP-A-402302 there is described a credit card system designed to make the use of credit/debit cards cost effective even for very small value transactions. A vendor of low-cost products or services, such as newspapers, subway tickets, parking vouchers, has a terminal with a conventional credit card reader and an associated memory. When a user wants to use his credit card to buy a low-cost item, the card is read as usual, but a sum of money much greater than the cost of the item is xe2x80x9ctransferredxe2x80x9d from the computer of the credit/debit card issuing authority. The amount of this sum of money is stored in the memory of the retailer and is associated in the memory with the number of its relevant card. The cost of the item purchased is deducted from that stored sum. The next time that customer wants to buy a subway ticket from that vendor, he/she uses the credit card. This time, rather than again having to make a call to the computer of the credit/debit card issuing authority, the cost of the item is simply deducted from the amount held in the relevant memory section of the vendor""s terminal. Only when there is insufficient credit in that memory section to fund a desired payment does the terminal again contact the computer of the card issuing authority for a further, relatively large, transfer.
In EP-A-0341219 there is described an integrated automatic information and telephone point. This apparatus permits of the possibility of requested automatic information services being charged according to the criteria used for the charging of calls from telephone boxes.
In the paper xe2x80x9cIC Card-Based Advanced Man-Machine Interface for Public Switched Telephone Network Servicexe2x80x9d, by Mizusawa et al, published in Electronics and Communications in Japan, Vol.73, 1990, No.1, Part 1, pages 36-54, there are described various applications of smart cards. In particular, the paper is concerned with personal numbering. Conventional PSTN service records are briefly discussed.
In EP-A-0325564 there is described a technique to permit a remote computer terminal to display images relevant to alphanumeric data passed to the computer over a low bit-rate link, without the usual problems associated with image transmission over low bit-rate links. This is achieved by storing relatively large image-elements in the computer""s memory, which elements are then picked out and assembled in accordance with simple instructions transmitted to the computer in association with the relevant alphanumeric data.
In the article xe2x80x9cTelescript: the emerging standard for intelligent messagingxe2x80x9d, by J Hanckmann, published in PTR Philips Telecommunications Review, Vol.52, 1994, No.1, pages 15-19, there is described what are termed xe2x80x98remote procedure callsxe2x80x99, which make use of software agents. So-called xe2x80x98smart messagesxe2x80x99 are described in which a correspondent can send messages that contain smart buttons. The message appears on the screen of the receiving device and, when the recipient clicks on the button, an action is performed.
The present invention is intended to provide communications apparatus which offers the possibility of controlling the complexity of billing operations.
Accordingly, in one aspect, the invention provides a service user apparatus arranged to automatically log service transactions, and service provider apparatus arranged to transmit account data through a communications network, the user apparatus being arranged to compare the account data with stored transaction data and to reconcile the two.
In another aspect, the storage and/or comparison operations may be carried out by independent apparatus not owned either by the service supplier or the service user.
In the event of successful reconciliation, payment may be initiated (e.g. by a xe2x80x9csmart-cardxe2x80x9d held at the user apparatus).
Several advantages are achieved by the distribution of the account storage operation to the user apparatus. Firstly, data storage becomes more distributed, and hence the bottlenecks associated with storage of vast amounts of data centrally with the telecommunications suppliers (as at present) are reduced. Thus, this aspect of the present invention provides the technical benefits of parallel data processing.
There are also secondary benefits, since the customer is more easily able to rely upon accounting data which has been stored by his own apparatus, and is able also to process the stored data for his own purposes (for example, further distribution or charging of the cost).
According to a further aspect of the invention, the same technical principles may be applied within a network, to distribute the billing and accounting within the network rather than centralising it as at present.
In a further aspect of the invention, use is made of periods of low communications usage to transmit accounting information through the network.
In a further aspect of the invention, which may be used independently of the earlier aspects, the services to be acquired by customer equipment are described by codes communicated between customer equipment and supplier equipment via a communications channel, the codes being structured to permit comparison and selection between similar services. For example, the codes may, in one embodiment, specify functional attributes of the service in such a manner as to be descriptive of other services possessing those attributes. Additionally or alternatively, the codes may be hierarchically structured, consisting of both a generic and specific description of the service the subject of each code.
Thus, in this aspect, the comparison of similar but non identical services by customer equipment is facilitated, thus improving the negotiation processes described in our above referenced international application.
In a further aspect of the invention, which is preferably but not necessarily operated in conjunction with the preceding aspect, customer terminal apparatus for the acquisition of services (e.g. telecommunications services) or goods includes a visual interface which displays, for each service, a representative image xe2x80x9ciconxe2x80x9d), the different icons associated with different services being represented consistently so that similar services are similarly represented. Preferably, attributes of services are represented consistently, so that all icons representing a particular service type (for example video telephony) all have an identical common portion visually representing that service. Preferably, the customer terminal is arranged to display the icons in succession, the position in the succession of different icons being dictated by their similarities, so that a user of the terminal equipment may xe2x80x9cbrowsexe2x80x9d through a sequence of similar services represented by visually similar icons.
This aspect of the invention renders it possible to select between a very large number of different services which may be available in future via telecommunications media.
Other aspects and embodiments of the invention are as described or claimed hereafter, with advantages that will be apparent from the following.